Summary of Core and its operations The main mission of the Education and Training Core (ETC) for the Johns Hopkins SPORT Center of Excellence is to design, implement and monitor an array of educational and training components to increase the number of public health researchers with capacities in systems science theories and methods who can advance our understanding of the causes of, and solutions to, the epidemic of childhood obesity. The goal is to provide trainees at our institution and our institutional partners, as well as a national audience, with a suite of training opportunities designed to expand the human capital that will be needed to bring systems thinking to bear. There are three main audiences we seek to reach: 1) pre-doctoral degree candidates and 2), postdoctoral candidates in the schools of Public Health and Engineering, and 3) scientists and scholars who wish to add systems science to previous substantive training in public health. We are committed to a combination of both formal course-based as well as hands-on training in a range of methodologies and theories pertinent to systems science and obesity. To provide structure to the didactic training, we will propose a new Certificate in Systems Science in Public Health at the School of Public Health. The Certificate program will be a school-level program that offers Master's and Doctoral students an additional credential. The heart of the hands-on training will involve a transdisiplinary research component, supervised by a dual mentorship team with primary and co-mentors chosen with representation in both systems science and public health. We have assembled a strong directorship and mentoring team that will develop, monitor and implement this curriculum on systems science, and we will reach out beyond our institutional borders by implementing a visiting scholar program to share talent with our Chinese partners. In total, we anticipate the capacity to train 5 doctoral students, 2 master's students, 8 post-doctoral fellows and 5 visiting scholars. A Training Subcommittee will monitor the admissions and subsequent training processes to ensure that the goals of the ETC are met and that there will be a broad variety of graduating trainees who can pursue careers in systems science or public health and who are knowledgeable of systems modeling for public health problems. There will also be a subset of trainees who will be able to serve as managers of complex systems modeling in public health. In addition we expect our training programs to touch up to 300 students and scholars through our proposed distance learning, hands-on courses, and workshops.